The study will investigate how qualitative outcomes in education can be realised through the use of emerging technologies to transform teaching and learning interactions and paradigms across differently positioned higher education institutions in South Africa. The intention of the project would be to develop models to improve quality fore redressing inequalities in Africa.
- To investigate innovative pedagogical practices which are using the emerging technologies for transforming teaching and learning across South African HEIs.
- To conduct case studies of innovative teaching and learning interactions which use emerging technologies across a sample of seven South African HEIs which are differently placed in the Higher Education sector.
- To investigate conscious and unconscious theoretical assumptions which underpin teaching and learning interactions in the selected sample of SA HEIs.
- To identify theoretical and practice models which could transform teaching and learning interactions across the HEIs and contribute towards qualitative outcomes.
Phase 1: Review of uses of emerging technologies in Higher Education and Development of Conceptual Framework
A review of uses of emerging technologies in higher education in general and South Africa in particular will be conducted. It is envisaged that co-investigators will conduct the review (to be restricted to the last 5 years) and present the findings at first project meeting/workshop. The outcome of this process will be a scoping a survey to establish whether the findings from the review are prevalent in the South African Higher Education or whether there were other uses of emerging technologies not reflected in the review. It will also provide a general background to the study. The participants in the study will also become familiar with the conceptual framework which will be used to inform the data collection and analysis.
The artefacts from this study will be published under the Creative Commons License as an Open Education Resource (OER).
Phase 2: Survey of teaching and learning interactions using ICTs in SA HEIs
This will involve designing and prototyping a scoping questionnaire prior to being administered to all HEIs in South Africa to establish current practices regarding emergent technologies (e.g.mobile learning, e-books and OERs) to enhance teaching and learning. The online questionnaire which will comprise closed and open ended questions will be guided by the first and second generation Activity Theory (see figure 2 in Uploaded Document entitled ‘Phases of Project using Activity Theory’). The objective of the survey will be to establish the activity systems that frame current practices of use of emerging technologies within South Africans HEIs.
This survey will answer sub-question 1: In what ways are emerging technologies used in innovative pedagogical practices to transform teaching and learning across South African HEIs?
Phase 3: Institutional Case Studies
The team of co-investigators, collaborators and students would conduct in-depth case studies (at least one from each of the participating 7 institutions) of innovative pedagogical practices using emergent technologies to enhance teaching and learning in South African higher education, with particular emphasis on those that would be useful and affordable in resource scarce contexts.
These case studies will be used to answer the second and third research sub- questions: What can be learnt from an in-depth examination of case studies of innovative practice in a sample of HEIs in which these emergent technologies are being used? and What are the conscious and tacit theoretical assumptions guiding higher educators' teaching and learning practices?
It is envisaged that case studies will use CHAT as a theoretical and methodological framework.
Although a triangulation of method will be encouraged, Mwanza & Engeström’s (2005) ‘eight-step model’ will provide the framework to anchor the case studies. The objective of each case study will be to explore the following methodological questions:
- What sort of activity am I interested in? Activity
- The activity of each case study will be the role of emerging technologies to mediate teaching and learning interaction in either a course or learning activity at a higher education institution.
- Why is this activity taking place? Object(ive) This is the agency or purpose for which the activity is undertaken. This will aim to uncover the qualitative outcomes in teaching and learning interactions for which emerging technologies are employed.
- Who is involved in carrying out this activity? Subjects
- This will seek to understand whether the subject is an individual educator, or a collective of educators (community) and or an individual learner or a collective of learners (community or a class).
- By what means are the subjects carrying out this activity? Tools The focus here will be on specific tools that are being used. This specific focus on tools will enable a comprehensive understanding of the appropriation of technology in the South African context. The need for appropriation is important given the diversity of students hence have varying levels of both physical and epistemological access to for example, the Internet.
- Are there any cultural norms, rules or regulations governing the performance of this activity? Rules This will be important to understand the socio-cultural context in which the emerging technologies are used. More importantly this will provide insight into enablers and constraints during the interaction of teaching and learning and how these are affect the achievement of qualitative outcomes.
- Who is responsible for what, when carrying out this activity, and how are these roles organised? Divisions of labour or roles
In addition to these steps which will be used as a guide to anchor the case studies, more generally, second generational CHAT will be used as a methodology to investigate and analyse the survey and the case studies which will be conducted at the HEIs represented by the principal investigator, co-investigators and certain PhD students i.e. – UWC, UCT, CPUT, SU, UP, Wits, Rhodes and Fort Hare.
Phase 4: Generation of the Model
The results from both the survey and the case studies will feed into the design of a transformative theoretical frameworks and practice guides in the use emerging technologies in teaching and learning. This development of outputs will be used to answer the fourth sub-question: What models of innovative theory and practice can be developed from the identification of transformative teaching and learning interactions and paradigms across the HEIs?
The analysis of this phase will be informed by the third generation activity theory.The resulting theoretical framework will be used to build pedagogical models which will serve as useful guides for educators which to integrate emerging technologies as teaching tools. The third generation of activity theory will be used to develop models across identified ‘good’ practices which become evident through the survey conducted in Phase 2 and the case studies conducted in Phase 3. The third generation of CHAT is useful in this Phase of developing a model as it illustrates how two or a network of activity systems interact across boundaries a potentially shared object (Engeström, 2001). (This is depicted in Figure 3 in the uploaded document entitled Phases of Project Using Activity Theory). The third generation of CHAT also addresses issues of difference, voice, historicity, representation, dialogue, emotion and identity, which had been neglected in past accounts of activity theory, but which will be of great importance to our project, which is looking at differently situated HEIs and their contexts in South Africa (Bakhurst, 2009; Daniels, 2008; Roth & Lee, 2007).
Phase 5: Dissemination of findings
The dissemination of findings will be through a Symposium at which educators involved in innovative uses of emerging technologies will be invited to show case their uses of technology; researchers at participating institutions will present their findings; results of the national survey will be presented; and the transformative theoretical and pedagogical frameworks (from Phase 4) presented for discussion. The outcome of the symposium will be a publication in a edited special journal of an ISI index journal (e.g. the British Journal of Educational Technology); and artefacts shared as an Open Education Resource.
